Apache To Steward NASA-Built Middleware 27
itwbennett writes "The Apache Software Foundation announced Wednesday that the Object-Oriented Data Technology (OODT), first developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has graduated to a top level project. The software 'provides a one-stop toolkit for building up a database, populating a database, setting up a work flow to get data into that database, and then serving out lots of different content from that database,' said Chris Mattmann, vice president of the OODT project. NASA uses the software to manage data from multiple domains, including astrophysics, earth carbon monitoring and land-water use. The National Cancer Institute also uses the software for its Daily Detection Research Network, which ties together multiple cancer research databases."
Not a "first NASA's Open Source release" (Score:5, Informative)
Despite what http://oodt.apache.org/ [apache.org] says, this is not NASA's first "Open Source" project, as Worldwind is older (2007). However, OODT may well be NASA's first Free Software project because Worldwind was released under a non-free license, whereas this is Apache 2 license. Yes, you read correctly. NASA has its own NOSA license (NASA Open Source Agreement - yuck), which is not a free software license by the standards of FSF, but is non the less approved by OSI (which makes it officially "Open Source"). Look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Open_Source_Agreement [wikipedia.org]
Re:The JPL (Score:4, Informative)
JPL never did any work with jet engines. It was founded between 1936 and 1941 (depending on what you consider founding) to work on rocket motors.
However, during that time, jet propulsion was all the rage (a 100mph difference would have been very important during WWII dog fights,) which led to the choice of names. Easier to get funding when you use the right buzzwords.
What is it? (Score:4, Informative)
I read the summary, the article, and a few pages on the website. They all talk about features, but no description of what the thing actually is, except that it's written in Python. I recognize most of the words there, and they have a block diagram with nebulous terms.
So, does anybody actually know what this is?